The Congress for Curious People

13 August 2013

A
Festival of Spectacular Cultures

August 29th – September 8th 2013

From Fun Fairs to Freak Shows… Magic Lantern Lectures to Flea
Circuses… Cyclopian Artists and Mediumistic Drawings to Severed Heads and
Anthropomorphic Taxidermy… Riotous Fireworks and the bright lights of an
otherworldly Blackpool to the dark recesses of Old Operating Theatres and
Clandestine Archives.

Join us for an excursion into the peculiar, the carnivalesque and
the macabre….

The Congress for Curious People is a week long festival of
spectacular cultures, followed by a two-day symposium, co-curated by Morbid
Anatomy, Preserved!, and Strange Attractor.

Founded in 2010 as a scholarly sideshow to the Congress of Curious
People – a theatrical celebration of the carnivalesque at the Coney Island
Museum in New York – the Congress for Curious People finds itself this
year in a series of hidden locales and out-of-the-way venues across the U.K.
Presenting talks, screenings, performances and walking tours, the festival will
bring together over 40 international contributors specialising in eccentric
customs, alternate histories and medical anomalies to explore ideas of spectacle
and curiosity in some truly fascinating locales.

A two-day symposium on ‘Reclaiming
Spectacle’ will include panels of academics, rogue scholars and artists
discussing the intricacies of collecting, the politics of bodily display,
non-human oddities, religion and the occult, whilst The
Horse Hospital will host ‘Ethel Le Rossignol: A Goodly
Company’, an exhibition of stunningly beautiful psychic artworks painted in
the 1920s by this previously unknown medium and artist. The Congress will
create a forum not only for discussing, but also for experiencing spectacle,
combining the niche and the popular, the scholarly and the entertaining.